Bush Is Getting The Respect He Has Earned

A couple days ago, in the opinion section of the Wall Street Journal, Jeffrey Scott Shapiro expressed his disgust in the treatment that President Bush has received by liberals and conservatives alike.

The treatment President Bush has received from this country is nothing less than a disgrace. The attacks launched against him have been cruel and slanderous, proving to the world what little character and resolve we have.

I would have laughed at Shapiro's distortion of reality, had it not become fodder for right-wing bloggers. Crocodile tears aplenty are being shed for poor, poor President Bush. All he ever wanted to do was lead the people that he loves in a manner befitting his respect for America.

NOT!

A more appropriate title for Shapiro's piece would have been, "The Treatment of America by Bush Has Been a Disgrace."

I could provide a laundry list of Bush's disrespectful actions, but I think providing one example should suffice. As quoted by Think Progress, Bush said this in April of 2004 [Emphasis in original]:

Secondly, there are such things as roving wiretaps. Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires — a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we’re talking about chasing down terrorists, we’re talking about getting a court order before we do so. It’s important for our fellow citizens to understand, when you think Patriot Act, constitutional guarantees are in place when it comes to doing what is necessary to protect our homeland, because we value the Constitution.

The thing about that is that Bush was lying. As he admitted in December of 2005, Bush signed the order for the NSA to spy on Americans without obtaining the required warrant from the FISA court. He went on to say that he had authorized that activity 30 times, and would continue to do so.

Bush apologists can argue that the illegal wiretapping program was necessary, but the fact remains that Bush lied. He said they were getting a court order for each wiretap when he knew damn well that they weren't.

There are many other examples of Bush's mistreatment of his office and his hatred of America, but I think one is enough to make my point. Bush lied to us. Not about getting his knob polished in the oval office, but about breaking the law. So don't come crying to me about how he is being so horribly maligned. If he hadn't cheated his way into office, thumbed his nose at the separation of powers, pissed on our Constitution, lied us into a war, etc., then maybe, maybe, a case could be made for his mistreatment. A president must earn the people's respect, though, and Mr. Bush has failed to do so.

From the Shapiro piece:

Earlier this year, 12,000 people in San Francisco signed a petition in support of a proposition on a local ballot to rename an Oceanside sewage plant after George W. Bush.

Well, that's just an insult to honest, hard working sewage plants everywhere.

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Bush Pulls Switcheroo - On Himself

Last August, President Bush issued bold and decisive rhetoric about Iran. As reported in The Guardian:

Mr Bush said Iran's nuclear programme would cast the Middle East "under a shadow of nuclear holocaust" and said the regime was the "the world's leading supporter of terrorism".

He followed that up in May with a speech in Israel in which he labeled as an appeaser anyone who wished to find a diplomatic solution to the problem of terrorism, and compared these unnamed people to the Nazi appeasers of World War II.



From the New York Times:

“Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along,” Mr. Bush said, in a speech otherwise devoted to spotlighting Israel’s friendship with the United States.

“We have an obligation,” he continued, “to call this what it is: the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.”

This all fit in very nicely with Bush's saber rattling over Iran ever since his infamous "Axis of Evil" speech. Imagine, then, my shock when I read that Bush had reversed his position and that, as The Guardian reported:

The US is planning to establish a diplomatic presence in Tehran for the first time in 30 years, a remarkable turnaround in policy by president George Bush who has pursued a hawkish approach to Iran throughout his time in office.

My first thought, of course, was that George Bush must be reading my blog, since just last month I pointed out why I felt that his hard-line stance toward Iran was the wrong way to go.

The true reason for Bush's about-face is difficult to pin down. He may be trying to salvage some sort of positive legacy in the Middle East, since his "roadmap to peace" led absolutely nowhere, and his wars are at this point not at all likely to succeed in the long term. Or he may truly be interested in negotiation with Iran for its own sake, to improve the prospects for peace in the region.

Whatever the motivation behind Bush turning into one of the appeasers that he lambasted only a couple months ago, since the alternative is a march to war, this is one Bush flip-flop that I can live with.
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Heads He Wins, Tails We Lose.

The Senate Intelligence Committee finally released their report on the Bush administration's "intelligence failures" leading to the Iraq war. Why did it take so long? Because the Senate Republicans stonewalled every step of the way, as usual. The report doesn't shed a whole lot of new light on the matter; it simply verifies what most of us on the left have been saying for a long time.

From Senate Intelligence Committee chairman John D. Rockefeller's press release:

“Before taking the country to war, this Administration owed it to the American people to give them a 100 percent accurate picture of the threat we faced. Unfortunately, our Committee has concluded that the Administration made significant claims that were not supported by the intelligence,” Rockefeller said. “In making ethe case for war, the Administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent. As a result, the American people were led to believe that the threat from Iraq was much greater than actually existed.”

“It is my belief that the Bush Administration was fixated on Iraq, and used the 9/11 attacks by al Qa’ida as justification for overthrowing Saddam Hussein. To accomplish this, top Administration officials made repeated statements that falsely linked Iraq and al Qa’ida as a single threat and insinuated that Iraq played a role in 9/11. Sadly, the Bush Administration led th nation into war under false pretenses.

“There is no question we all relied on flawed intelligence. But, there is a fundamental difference between relying on incorrect intelligence and deliberately painting a picture to the American people that you know is not fully accurate."

You can read the entire report here.

The New York Times, in an editorial on the 6th, states:

Over all, the report makes it clear that top officials, especially Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, knew they were not giving a full and honest account of their justifications for going to war.

And:

According to the Senate report, there was no evidence that Mr. Hussein intended to use weapons of mass destruction against anyone, and the intelligence community never said there was.

The Times ends their editorial with this:

We cannot say with certainty whether Mr. Bush lied about Iraq. But when the president withholds vital information from the public — or leads them to believe things that he knows are not true — to justify the invasion of another country, that is bad enough.

The defense offered by Bush apologists has been that the intelligence was bad, therefore the Bush administration is not to blame. So let me ask this: which is worse, a president who would deliberately mislead us into a war, or a president who is so [dim, slow, oblivious, out of the loop] that he doesn't know to ask the questions that will determine how much of a threat we are facing?

Bonus question: Given all that we know about the Iraq intelligence failure/manipulation, how are we supposed to trust what they say about Iran? Or any country, for that matter?
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EDIT: For an opposing view of the report, check out According To Nikki's take.